uv + Splash Screen

[MrHenning]

I am testing to move my development dependency handling from conda to uv.
Everything seems to work well, except for the splash screen.

I install all packages by e.g. uv pip install pyinstaller into my local uv-venv.

The issue seems to be that _tkinter is not installed as an extension, so tkinter_extension_file will not be set here.
However, is I manually set the system binaries here like so:

        tcl_lib = "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtcl8.6.so"
        tk_lib = "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtk8.6.so"
        return tcl_lib, tk_lib

everything seems to work, and the splash-screen shows when the packaged app launches.

I don't really understand the internals of PyInstaller well enough do know if this is somehow fixable with uv. Any suggestions?

[bwoodsend]

We're not going to make PyInstaller blindly assume that the system tkinter is available and a compatible version. If you want to do that yourself then fine but it would be far more sensible to just pick a Python implementation that works.

[MrHenning]

Thanks for your reply! Sounds reasonable 🙂
If I find a non-hacked solution to my problem, I will post it here.

[MrHenning]

Ok, my problem seems to be a known issue for Python-standalone, which does not include tkinter (?!?), so _tkinter.__file__ does not exist.

There is an issue on uv, which also causes a problem for the matplotlib tkagg backend apparently.

[rokm]

The problem is that in python-standalone builds, Tcl and Tk libraries are statically linked into Python shared library, and that Tcl/Tk symbols are not exported from there:

nm ~/.local/share/uv/python/cpython-3.11.12-linux-x86_64-gnu/lib/libpython3.11.so.1.0 | grep Tcl_Init
0000000000ce8b30 t Tcl_Init
0000000000d2a060 t Tcl_InitBignumFromDouble
0000000000ce6540 t Tcl_InitCustomHashTable
0000000000ce6500 t Tcl_InitHashTable
0000000000c63980 t Tcl_InitMemory
0000000000d4b1f0 t Tcl_InitNotifier
0000000000d0fe60 t Tcl_InitObjHashTable

(note the lower-case t for symbol type, which means that it is local instead of exported one).

If the Tcl/Tk symbols were at least exported from the Python shared library, we could try to load them from there. But as things currently stand, python-standalone builds are incompatible with splash screen.

---

And collecting the system Tcl/Tk shared libraries is generally not an option, because a Tcl/Tk installation also comes with a set of .tcl scripts that need to be collected. So if the application itself also used tkinter, we would need to decide which set of .tcl script directories to collect - the ones from the system (corresponding to Tcl/Tk shared libraries used by splash screen) or the ones from uv installation (corresponding to Tcl/Tk static libraries used by the application). As Brénainn mentioned, the two might be of different versions, and might be incompatible.

[MrHenning]

Thanks for the additional info. I'll wait for the above issue to be resolved (or rejected) by uv, or use pip in the meantime. Or just not use a splash screen.

Thanks for all the work on PyInstaller! I think I barely start to see the complexity of it ☺️